She turned on Phil, pulling away from his light clutch. “Don’t think that because I let you carry me in your hand you can take liberties,” she said, realizing how she was enjoying the dramatics of the rippling aquarium light.
Phil backed up and bared his palms. He hung his head so Jill had to bend her knees and cock her head to see his face shifting through different expressions, masking and muffling, until he popped up with a mostly disengaged, slightly amused smile.
“I’m not an egg baby, a fuzzy chick, or a small animal in need of rescue,” Jill said to make sure he got the point—yet at the same time she checked out his shoulder-to-hip ratio.
“I guess I did want to tell you not to be afraid of the big man Mike,” said Phil.
“I knew it,” Jill said, as she looked at his lips and motioned for him to lead her on while she followed at a safe distance behind.
Phil turned and led Jill out of the room and down another white hallway. For his part, as he watched Jill stand in front of the flickering aquariums, he’d felt something come alive in him other than irony. Although there was that too. While Jill had been thinking about her merpeople Phil had been in the den, the dark den of his adolescence, learning how to be a man by watching Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, with her shivering glycerin tears. Mike walked by the entrance to the den with his real live date, Melinda Fox, who pulled back, leaned sinuously into the room, and said, “Who’s that?” and pointed to Phil who sat in a recliner with a bowl of freshly popped movie-night popcorn.
“Who’s that?” Mike repeated, sticking his head into the den. He flipped on the overhead light to reveal Phil in his pajamas, which were patterned with miniature Scottie dogs.
“Oh, that’s the king of the gaylords,” said Mike. Phil, who’d just shoved a super-large handful of popcorn into his mouth, tried to smile.
Now, fifteen years later, he said, “A gaylord already is a king, you can’t be a king of the gaylords, it’s redundant, dumbass!”
“What?” asked Jill, the white hallway suddenly resembling a futuristic loony bin.
“Mike’s my brother,” Phil told Jill.
“OK.”
“So without me he’s nothing,” said Phil, rather too desperately.
Phil wanted to tell Jill that Mike made his original money on cigar bars and paintball playgrounds—that Mike’s true calling was discovering and capitalizing on macho bro-culture fads. He wanted to tell her that he, Phil, was the real film man—a connoisseur, an MFAster, a maker of movies himself. He had pointed Mike in the direction of several solidly written popcorn crunchers, from which Mike had made millions. He’d done it in exchange for funding for his own project, Cries and Cries. But if he said all of this, he would have to tell her that he made Cries and Cries, his sad masterpiece that no one had gone to see.
Now they approached another large arched door and for a moment Jill thought it was a rippling wall of water. It danced sinuously in the light with the pearlescent sheen of an ocean after an oil spill. As they moved closer the ripples stilled and Jill saw that the door was inlaid with the insides of abalone shells. She stopped and cupped her fingers along a shell as if to scoop up the ghost of its former inhabitant.
“Mike doesn’t hunt these, does he?” she asked. A smile moved across Phil’s face. And something in Jill sunk like a diving bell.
She’d recently read an article about abalone hunters. The article had called the practice “the new most dangerous game,” yet Jill had not felt bad about the northern California divers who lost their lives in pursuit of the elusive sea snails. These were hunters who dove with knives to cut through the thick ropes of seaweed, just as knights had fought their way through thickets like pubic hair, or scaled the skirts of castles to claim poor alabaster princesses, tender white mussels who, just like Greta Garbo, wanted to be left alone.
After reading the article, Jill went online and found a YouTube video in which a proud diver energetically shucked an abalone, then laid it out on a platter and prodded its organ sac for tiny, throwaway pearls. On the sidebar of her computer screen came hundreds of such videos, showing how to dice, fry, and season the delicacy—the videos multiplied like different varieties of porn.
Her mermaids would not like this.
Violet, a mostly good feminist and eco-critic, would not like it at all. There was something very awful and stupid, Jill thought, about choosing to hunt a creature that so resembled, in all its metaphorical configurations, a vagina.
She pushed open the heavy door.
Mike Swanson sat at the back of a large dark room cast into silhouette by a bright wall-sized fish tank behind him. At first he seemed to be asleep; his head slumped into his chest, his legs kicked up sideways onto a large desk. As Jill walked forward the room was quiet but for a click, click, click, too irregular for an aquarium pump or air conditioner. Yet the only things moving in the room were the fish, though barely. Drugged or bored they hung like puppets, flapping a flipper every now and then as if paid to do it.
As a girl Jill had thought there was something lonely about walking through Chicago’s big indoor aquarium. She’d been surprised by the strange suspension of sound, being so close to all that flickering life yet not able to touch or hear anything. As she continued across the room the light from the fish display leaked around Mike’s edges and divided along the shiny facets of his alligator cowboy boots, turning him into half menacing water creature.
Jill stood five feet away. She was close enough to see Mike’s hands working what she thought was a cell phone but then realized was a small plastic hula dancer. Mike pressed his thumb into the base of her circular stand and she collapsed, not neatly with a bow or a bend in the knees as if to commence the hula, but in complete prostration—limbs and torso crumpling into a lump. When he released the button she popped back up as if nothing had happened—the past was erased. Her eyes bright, ruby lips just slightly, mockingly smiling. Mike pressed and released, pressed and released. He pressed, pressed, pressed, and seemed ready to fling the defective dancer when Jill wavered across his radar.
The lady now in front of Mike was large and flexible looking. Fully erect, she was at least six feet tall. She carried a shiny multipronged piece of metal equipment at her side. She was a late-night TV show warrior princess, a first masturbatory fantasy. It was Mike’s birthday, and he thought, yes, this is more like it.
The hula dancer had been a gift from the walrus. It had been Mike’s only gift in a long, disappointing day. But now his bros had come through for him. Though which bro was observant enough to understand what he liked, he didn’t know or really want to think about. Whoever had sent her understood that he liked a challenge. A woman who might, theoretically, beat him up.
“Well, hello there,” Mike said, straightening in his chair. He heard how his voice sounded canned, but this was role playing, right? Only Phil would accuse him of being permanently canned. Phil who had just quit. On his birthday. He’d actually said, “I’m just disappointed in the common moviegoing audience, you know, people.” Mike, a.k.a. “the dumb one,” had said, “Well, good luck avoiding them.”
Jill watched as Mike raised his crossed legs, hovered them an inch above the table, and slowly lowered them to the floor in a not-so-subtle demonstration of abdominal strength. She began to worry more acutely about her mermaids. Violet would never find a human who really saw her, or could love her for her desire to be free. Mike Swanson didn’t even recognize her. Granted, the other night at the party, she hadn’t been quite so tall. But she’d talked to him for twenty minutes! She’d described the merpeople’s outfits and he said, “So they’ll be hot?”
She nodded her head yes, hesitantly. Her heroine Violet Fin would be sexy though not skinny: she’d have real thighs and a belly roll. Mike had given her his card.
And now Phil flicked on the overheads.
Mike blanched in the light, puckering his face. “What the fuck, Phil?”
“Just wanted to make sure you treat this little lady wi
th respect,” Phil said.
“Little lady?” was Mike’s reply.
Jill looked down at her growing biceps—she was passing the seven-foot mark. She flexed her fingers, shifted her weight from one foot to the other to regain balance. Her self-perception hadn’t caught up with the size of her body and this sometimes gave her vertigo. And she was annoyed. She hated that people didn’t see things more clearly—she hated projections, and un-careful looking, but even more she hated fluorescent lighting—the way it left no room for the imagination.
The light shot down from buzzing tubes on the ceiling and Jill felt it as fine shards of fiberglass; inhalable, invisible, piercing the skin. It made the room much smaller and a hundred times uglier—revealing piles of boxes, and one wall only half-covered in mint-green paint. There was a dartboard on the wall, a leather couch set in front of a big-screen TV and a gaming console. There was a life-size cardboard cut-out bikini model holding a beer. There was the hazy flashback to the couple of times she’d been inside frat houses, and the all-around feeling of stunted growth.
“Are you really the Mike Swanson who produced Cries and Cries?” Jill asked.
Now it was Mike’s turn to smile. “Funny that you bring that up,” he said. “That was Phil’s special project.”
“Well, I liked it,” said Jill.
“She liked it,” said Phil affirmatively, and then he said, “You did?”
To be precise, Jill had liked some of Cries and Cries. As a whole the movie was pretentious, overly bloated with references, and in bad need of a new title. But there were beautiful moments. She liked the Bergmanesque close-ups that lingered so long, the young heroine’s face became as indeterminate and strange as a word said over and over again. She liked that the movie was told from a girl’s point of view, and she appreciated the nods to Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Spirit of the Beehive—movies about girls’ metaphorical death at adolescence, though she wished that instead of death, those movies had been about transformation. Girls’ spirits didn’t really die when they entered the world of women versus men, dark versus light, passive versus active; their spirits often transmuted into something smarter, and stranger—less understood, but strong.
“Well,” said Jill with a sigh, “I came because I admired you for making that movie.” And then, “Got to go now!”
Mike said, “Wait!” He walked around his desk, filled his lungs with air, and spread his arms out—he went wide, since, next to Jill, he could no longer go tall. “Nobody went to see that film,” Mike said with the same sly smile Jill had seen Phil use—though on Phil it looked like a disguise. “If nobody went to see that film, which you so admired, what makes you think anybody will go to see what you have? Ah yes, I remember, the little mermaids… ?”
This sounded like equal parts insult and opening.
But Jill had already noticed something, and connected it to the door inlaid with abalone shells. It was Mike’s soul, perhaps, hanging from a hook in the corner by the fish. It was the black suit of a scuba diver, headless and handless, and shimmering as if still wet.
“People will go to my movie because it’ll be better,” Jill called out, turning and heading to the door. Her fingers laced automatically around the leather coil of the grappling hook. Sometimes, when she was cresting the seven-foot mark, her body simply did things. Things for which she could not take responsibility.
Behind her she felt Mike’s eyes, tracking.
Phil yelled out, “Can I call you?”
Outside Jill was no longer in danger of falling cigarettes or crushing drop ceilings. Her horizon line was a cluster of girls’ heads flipping their flatironed hair up against metal and glass, and up above that, the oily human-made sunset.
She decided that her mermaids would prefer a smaller production company, and that anyway, she now had more to write. She saw a new option for Violet’s freedom. The angry god who had banished her merfamily to land would surely accept a human sacrifice as reparation. She wondered if the flesh of a human would taste as succulent as the flesh of an abalone. The flesh of a human who had violated the laws of the sea.
Dora
The first time Dora came back I didn’t recognize her.
She appeared at our party as a ripple in the wallpaper, as an outline of a young woman whose cloak matched the damask—her hair, a mess as usual, was now a hovering arrangement of funeral flowers.
Our father had died only a month before, and I was busy with his friends, high-ranking party officials who had come about the money. Today these men were sheet metal. Only their eyes were alive, wide and trapped in steel casing. I was sure any grief they had over my father’s passing escaped their bodies in toxic fumes.
So my eyes wandered as I talked. Flitted out and around the men’s dull heads, and I caught glimpses of her—moving to sit on the high-backed sofa, though, here, her face blurred and her skin absorbed the ripples in the silk. I saw her walk across the Oriental carpet, its swirls and arabesques curled up around her legs like vines. It wasn’t until she passed by a window that I understood that her body was delineated by tiny holes, empty cells, like pin perforations made in paper, and that those holes shifted inside her to absorb the shape or pattern of whatever she stood in front of. There in the window the sun shone right through her. She was a woman-shaped tree—strings of tiny lights wrapped intricately around her branches. She was just as I imagine she always wanted to be.
Perhaps it was my father’s death that made her appearance possible. For the last month everything had seemed like a photographic illusion, a double-exposed photograph in which the two takes almost, but don’t quite, match. In one take my father was still alive; in the second my father had died too early, without, I felt, ever really knowing me.
As soon as I could escape the friends I climbed the stairs to my old perch in a corner of the second-story balcony where Dora and I used to crouch and peer through the balustrade, eavesdropping on parties like this. Above me rose the suit of armor, seventeenth-century and mottled, arms sealed at its sides. When I was a boy I dreamt I was trapped inside it, vanished to oblivion inside my own home. Sometimes I’d dream my father was trapped in an identical suit, and we stood in silence, our voices stolen, in much the same way we sat for Sunday dinner.
The sun was setting and the chandeliers had not been lit. In the large foyer she was nearly invisible. She hovered and listened over shoulders yet took care never to betray herself, never to stay in one place for too long. When she stopped for one, two, three seconds her cells clumped together, the perforations clustered into vaguely familiar features.
But I stopped myself. I was a painter of portraits. How many sketches had I made in which the subject resembled me, or her; in which my yearning made the models grow long noses, and close-set eyes?
And then I lost track of her. I didn’t notice the ripple on the stairs until she was three or four steps up, heading toward me. I pressed back against the wall and listened to the tap of her feet, accompanied by a third beat, which I first imagined came from the tip of an umbrella. But the sound was too pronounced for an umbrella; it was more like the sound of a gavel or a wooden walking stick tipped in steel. It was an announcement of presence. And then the sound stopped. Her steps proceeded softly to the center of the balcony. And then stopped again.
I knew I should move. Discover her. I was a grown man, famous in certain circles, inheritor of the estate. I was a painter of portraits; men and women sat for me until I uncovered their secrets. I revealed people to themselves and they thanked me for it, though not, I think, my father. He sat for me once, many years after Dora left, and when he looked at the finished portrait his face sealed into its final defensive mask. “Is that how you see me?” he asked.
I stepped out toward her; she had her back to me and was leaning against the banister and looking out over it. With my step she grew more solid. She turned and revealed herself, for the game was on her terms.
Dora wore the unfashionable thick wool cloak she had left in, a
nd her hair was loose and by now streaked with a silvery gray. She held a rifle in her left hand, her rifle for shooting birds, her most unwomanly rifle. It was the beat I’d heard on the stairs.
When I reached her side I too looked out over the party, at all my father’s foreshortened and black-suited friends.
“Should I shoot them?” she asked with a smile in her voice.
And I said, “No, Dora. They’re just birds.”
But I didn’t dare move. I had found her again, my wild and prodigal twin. And I needed her to stay there, poised and by my side.
Winona
1.
Winona wakes up on a pillowcase that hasn’t been changed in a year. She secretly likes the smell of it. Likes to fall asleep to her scent, and then linger in the morning, a few moments with it, as with an illicit lover. She is half awake, and half lying on the porch of her grandmother’s old colonial in Georgia. She’s lying in a crooked shape, as if she’s doing the Charleston on her back, but really she’s been stabbed in the gut. A black-handled cheese knife sticks out of her stomach and a glass of iced tea balances on her chest. She’s concentrating on the iced tea glass, which is rising and falling with her breath—if she moves to pull out the knife the tea will spill and pool between her hip bones, run down between her legs, saturate and ruin the watered silk of her best Sunday dress. The smell of sweaty hair floats into the dream along with something more sour—matted fur or rotting fall leaves. Sugar drifts down through her glass, and melts at the bottom like sticky snow.
It’s hot on the dream porch, but it’s hotter in her bedroom, and she doesn’t want to wake up. She wants to hurry up and die in the dream—she thinks that rather than leaving, she’ll finally join her body, be one with the sweat, blood, and sugar, and she has to get there before her mother knocks on her bedroom door, or walks out on the porch and notices one of several things: the ring of iced-tea perspiration gathering on her dress, her deathlike stillness, the missing cheese knife.
Elegies for Uncanny Girls Page 9
